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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

> Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer

Define "hurt".

I'd rather make a decision to pay $5/month for a service than to be the product and get spied on

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News, and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

You're justifying the abuse of people's privacy because they can't afford to buy out of it.

That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.

> they have automatic price discrimination built in.

How, exactly? It's entirely opaque to the user.

At a minimum, you should offer a free, ad-supported version alongside a paid, ad-free (and tracking free) experience.

> an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models

Democracies are bought on advertising.

Hiding the price of the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding who buys the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding how many other people's attentions are also being sold is not a positive side effect to the user. All of these are detriments to the user.

There's no reason Facebook can't charge Brazilians 5 BRL instead of 5 USD.

Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?

This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.

If ad companies manage to set up international ad networks that show relevant ads to the user according to their home country and interests, I wonder if all that effort and hard work couldn't have instead be spent building a platform for collecting payment internationally

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